Rhetor-in-residence

Here is some info and a link to my latest publication on using: GIS in the Composition Classroom. Special thanks to Patricia, Blake, and Palak in the Clemson GIS Lab for all of their knowledge and support. Contact them if you want to learn more about GIS and the many opportunities for to learning data visualization.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow the user to visualize and display geographic data. This web project details my implementation of Esri Survey 1-2-3 and Esri ARC GIS (a proprietary GIS system offered through the Esri Company) in a FYC (first-year composition classroom). The class used GIS to build smart maps and web applications for visualizing and analyzing data. The project offered a challenge to students to collect and analyze geographic data in order to tell stories and formulate arguments linking space, place, time, and rhetoric. Visualizing this collected data allows the researcher to consider the rhetorical implications of space and place. I argue that by implementing this methodology, my students come to know rhetorics as a grammar for our relationality in space and place at a given time.

​Inside this webtext, you will find an example of FYC GIS praxis that includes theory, method, student data collection tools, smart maps, Story Map applications, and student feedback. In terms of getting around, use the navigation tabs at the top and bottom of each page to move from one section to the next, or return to the "Map" to follow another route through the webtext. It is my hope that this GIS praxis serves as a guide for classrooms seeking to examine how social spaces are produced and that this webtext offers an example of how students might use tools to both question and attend to the spaces and places in which they inhabit.

I made a podcast for this blog - first time ever using Adobe Audition. No, it's not perfect, but I'll only get better with practice. I interviewed Clemson Virtual Reality President Tom Birdsong, who gave me the skinny on the Clemson Immersive Space. You can find the podcast link Here.

Making podcasts is easy. All you need is an interesting person, a line of questions, a mic borrowed from the library, and a computer to record the content. In my next blog, I'll show you how to make a podcast in Adobe Audition so you can spread the good word of citizen science.

Why I love ADOBE MUSE

Hey Wix and Weebly are cool...if you want to use their tools--and perhaps be limited by them. But its even cooler to make your own websites and have more control over where and how it gets hosted. Hey I love Google Sites where I can embed assets, quizes, and post real-time data using sheets...super cool for sure, but as a teacher and designer, man I wouldn't trade Adobe Muse for any of these other programs, and for a number of reasons:

1. Muse is a visual design program in the same manner of the previous three web site building tools I mentioned. Like these other programs, it lets the user work with visuals that the program later converts into code. However, what's different about Muse is that it generates the files you need to make a website, and then the user has to learn to load them onto a server. For my students, managing files on a server is a great lesson in computer science. My students learn how file names work, how web browsers work, how they can host multiple web sites through files hosted on a server.

2. While Muse is visual, it allows you to drop in code. As a result, my students begin tinkering with code to get their web designs to do things Muse can't. Somewhere on the web, someone is working through the same problems my students are working out. In this way, my students learn to look for these affinity spaces.

​3. Muse lets you see the topography of your site designs. (See Below) When my students can see the non linear progression of a site, I think it makes their web designs that much more creative. We are not just building web sites...we are building web applications that the provide tools for the user.

4. As educators teaching students how to learn technology, we can easily provide scaffolding for Muse by teaching other design programs, and at the same time, we can teach Muse to scaffold for the next program. The most important thing we can do when we teach digital making is not to teach the tool themselves, but to teach how we learn new tools. Tools will change, but the skill of learning how to learn technology is something that will last a student's lifetime.

For the Better Clemson App, we build for 320 screen size (standard for mobile phone design) and used a common :font, Gil Sans 36-point headings and Gil Sans 24-point text. In this way, our various designs have parity when a user moves from one project to the next. We built mobile-first designs because this app is intended to run off of the ubiquitous computing technology, thus drawing the user into spaces and places. I require students to include external video, audio, and other widget features offered through Adobe Muse to create tools for users.

Initially my students used QR codes to draw their user into a scene. This began with the use of QR codes that were placed around campus. In some cases, students hid the QR codes in books in the library, under benches, on stop signs. As the project evolved, my students began using basic passcoding to move the from one space to the next. I give my students basic JavaScript passcodes that they must manipulate to enable functionality within their specific design. If the passcode question asked the user to identify what the sign says at the corner of X and Y streets, the code reads as follows:

I have found that my students learn to use code to solve other design problems. For example, in one application that focused on campus public transportation, students used IFrames to import a live bus map that showed buses circulation in real-time. One group, concerned with the lack of food options on campus was able to problem solve how an IFrame could be used to incorporate other applications that provided real time information about residence halls dining options and a space for commenting on the quality. Students embedded an IFrame with a Google Form where students could report their eating experience. The corresponding data was embedded on a Google Sheet in another page. I am arguing that my students, many of whom had no prior experience with code, became less afraid of it, and more likely to engage with it because we used a flexible design program in conjunction with problem-based learning. As a result of this unit and these hybrid practices, I have had several students enroll in coding classes. ​

Using Thing Link to create VR interactivity.

While TheBetter Clemson App’s original purpose was to draw attention to spaces and places on our campus so that users could see our campus problems first hand, as the unit developed over five semesters and we thought more and more about mobility, it was only natural that we would eventually experiment with embodiment in virtual spaces. As a result, I worked with Clemson’s Academic Technology Council to pilot VR in the classroom. My students gathered spherical images and worked with digital tools to provide interactivity within the application. We had some success using a program called ThingLink (https://www.thinglink.com) to annotate our images. With ThingLink, makers can tag photos in standard or spherical images. Users can then click the tag buttons to access dropdowns, connect to hyperlinks, or play audio and video, in addition to many other utilities. One group of students focused on Campus safety using ThingLink to create scenes in which the user could learn more about different choices in hopes that the user would make better choices if they ever found themselves in that situation.

Another student group focused on transportation infrastructure at our school, which many students find extremely dangerous for pedestrians as our campus does not regulate automobile traffic. Our roads are busy and that's a problem.

Citing this danger a group used satire to compose a situation that both drew attention to both the danger of our infrastructure and the high cost of Clemson tuition. Playing off of the myth that students struck by Catbuses on the crosswalk receive free tuition (this is not factual), this app details how a given student might proceed to get hit by a bus and thus take advantage of the dangerous transportation infrastructure so as to receive free tuition. The app uses spherical images that provide instructions on how to get run over by a Catbus and a real-time map embedded in the app to show where the Catbuses are circulating on campus. Again, this app is satire - an attempt to use humor to draw attention to safety problems on campus and to our high cost of tuition.

I wanted to share an Adobe Spark from I talk I gave about writing ecologies and STEM communication: Basically this talk is about why we need to make more of an effort to talk about science both publicly and privately, and how we might create change-agents by giving our audience tools to make a difference. Check it out here. As an example, I profile the work of Sean Morey, a former Clemson English professor now working at Tennessee. His work, Deepwater Horizon, Roadkill TollBooth, A (ME)Memorial, creates a moment of crisis for his audience that calls on them to act. You can access his project HERE.

WHAT: STEM DAY is a program targeting middle school (7th & 8th grade) girls and boys in the Upstate of South Carolina. The goal of the day is to introduce the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), to underrepresented students in the area. Activities include hands on engineering and science demonstrations, lunch with PEER mentors and WISE big sisters, and a STEM industry presentation. MORE INFO HERE

On the night of Friday, July 18, 1969 at 11:15p.m., just two days shy of the Apollo 11 moon landing, U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy drank too much and then proceeded to take a drive in his mother’s convertible with a beautiful girl sitting in the front seat beside him—a girl, we should note, who looked nothing like his wife. On that drive, Kennedy lost control of the car in what would come to be known as the "Chappaquiddick Incident." The car hurtled over the Dike Bridge and into a tidal pond. While Kennedy was able to save himself by swimming ashore, the girl, Mary Jo Kopechne, died at the scene of the accident. Kennedy, acting in fear or delusion, fled the scene. Throughout the country, there was much debate as to whether or not Kennedy should remain in office. Given the situation, it would even be reasonable to charge Kennedy with involuntary manslaughter in the death of Kopechne. However, a week after the incident, having just plead guilty to fleeing the scene of an accident, Kennedy gave a speech in front of a national broadcast audience in which he put on a masterful display of rhetoric. Somehow in that speech, Teddy Kennedy climbed himself out of that brackish mess, his clothes dry and gleaming white.

But how did he do it? In “A pentadic analysis of Senator Edward Kennedy's address to the people of Massachusetts,” Ling (1970) examines Kennedy's speech showing how Kennedy minimizes his own personal agency in the episode and how he deflects any agency he might have to his audience as regards his decision to remain in the U. S. Senate. To explain how this was done, Ling refers to Burke’s (1969) pentad, a rhetorical tool for analyzing the scene of communication to understand the different relationships of the agent in relation to the scene, agency, act, purpose. In Kennedy’s case, Kennedy emphasizes that he was himself was powerless at the scene. His focus on the agent-scene ratio framed him as a victim of circumstances, especially having lived in a family that had suffered so much tragedy. In a subsequent move in the speech, Kennedy masterfully transfers the little agency he possesses to his audience, and by doing so, offers them little choice: if his audience believes his version of the tale to be true, then they must support his bid to keep his seat in the U. S. Senate. As the Kennedy example shows, rhetoric is indeed a powerful tool that might be used to persuade an audience.

It is also a powerful tool that we might use heuristically, as a way to think up and create projects that persuade our audiences to not only go along with what we think, but to act on our behalf. This is, I argue, the most powerful thing that rhetoric can do.

I want my students to give their audience powerful tools to make Clemson a better place.

As rhetors, it is helpful to look at any communication in a dramatic sense using Burke's Pentad…that is, as rhetors we must establish a dramatic scene for our audience by considering the agent, scene, agency, act, and purpose.

While my students obviously focus on different outcomes in their own projects than Kennedy, Ling’s explanation provides an excellent example of how the Pentad works, and also how my students might motivate their own audience to act. Different audiences are motivated by different ratios in Burke's Pentad. In our case as makers of the Clemson APP, we want to emphasize agency and purpose ratios for our audience. That is, after we establish the scene and why our message is important, we want to transfer a sense of purpose and power to our audience. They can make a difference. In a digital medium of the Better Clemson App, I want my students to give their audience powerful tools to make Clemson a better place. In the digital medium, we should expect that any shift in our message towards audience agency and purpose should be accompanied by tools. This is why digital communication is so powerful. It is through tools that we make possible the realization of agency in our user.

The most popular technique my students use to provide tools for their audience is to set up an email form within their web-based document that emails a person of importance in a given situation. This is easily done through an Adobe Muse widget, but such forms are also available on the web as HTML code.

​Additionally, students in my class have created links to petitions that were already being promoted by third parties. For example, a group that was studying football ticket distribution created a final link to a petition that intended to revise the system.

I have also had students gather feedback from their audience to create a discourse community. However, in that I challenge my students to create app development that does not require constant rebuilding of the webpage, I want any discourse tools to be built into the system. For example, students trying to problem solve how they could make better food choice options in real time by reporting the food offerings at our different cafeterias needed to think about how they could create a tool to accomplish this end.

The easiest solution in this case was to gather responses using a Google Form that students embed in the app and then publishing the response data by embedding the corresponding Google Sheet on a subsequent page. ​ Now my student's audience would know what was being served where and how to make the healthiest food choices.

When we make a digital document, we need to create a scene that draws in our audience. Then we need to figure out how we might transfer agency in our user to act, giving them the tools to do so.

Some of the entries in the Better Clemson APP are gamified. Why? Because games are fun! But don't forget, games can also be persuasive. One scholar who has studied how persuasion works in games is Georgia Tech scholar Ian Bogost. Here is Bogost on the Colbert Report. Don't you wish you had that kind of scholar cred?

In Persuasive Games, Bogost defines procedural rhetoric as the “practice of using process persuasively.”
To explain procedural rhetoric in other terms...when a player fails, they must learn from those failings and make different choices the next time the user finds themselves in similar situations. The procedural is a move away from the verbal and into the realm of symbolic action.

Bogost believes that the power of persuasive games is the discourse that emerges from the user, as interlocutors “engage, consider, and respond in turn, either via the same medium or a different one.” The idea of procedural rhetoric is also important in the sense that we can create a virtual environment where individuals might begin to “practice” the sort of enactive change that may be necessary in the actual. As Bogost explains, “If policy issues are complex systems that recombine and interrelate with one another according to smaller rules of interaction, then video games afford a new perspective on political issues, since they are especially effective at representing complex systems.”

One way that you can easily make a persuasive game and teach your students simple computer coding is through the use of programs like Twine. In Twine you can storyboard adventures that require the user to make certain decisions to achieve a desired outcome; kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure book.

How might you craft a message using procedural rhetoric as the theory and Twine as the tool for communicating your message?

Author

Stephen Quigley is a PhD student in ClemsonRCID (Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design) He specializes in digital composition pedagogy and theory helping a wide range of individuals to communicate their message using digital tools.